Release of Pacoima Rapist Highlights System’s Flaws : Crime: Hunt for suspect in child sex attacks sparks questions over state’s emphasis on prison over treatment.

When Robert Lee Donaldson stood before a judge in 1982, he faced a newly revised criminal justice system designed to get tough on child molesters.

Furious over painful cases of criminals who were freed only to find new victims, politicians abolished laws that had sent offenders to state mental hospitals until they were presumed to be cured.

Rather than treatment, Donaldson got the maximum prison term possible, 16 years for raping a 15-year-old boy in Pacoima.

But along with the certainty that he would not be released too soon, the new law guaranteed something else--that Donaldson, through good behavior in prison, largely controlled the date of his freedom.

He served 9 1/2 years and was automatically paroled without a hearing. Today, police say they have firm evidence that Donaldson returned in August to the neighborhood where he had been accused of raping three youths a decade ago to prey once again, abducting and raping three more, each of whom was walking to school. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Donaldson, who is at large.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

“The way the system operates now doesn’t afford as much protection as it would have before,” said Jerome DiMaggio, the state’s parole administrator for northern Los Angeles County. “There are many other cases like Donaldson that are a danger to the community. There are a lot of guys like him out there.”

DiMaggio has called Donaldson’s release a “flaw in the system.”

The California system has shifted from an emphasis on treatment to imprisonment, but without enough data to create the proper balance, said psychiatrist Craig Nelson, treatment director for the Sex Offender Treatment and Evaluation Project at Atascadero State Hospital. Today, experts seldom speak of a “cure” for sex offenders. Much like treatment for alcoholics, psychiatrists now try to alter offenders’ behavior patterns and train them to stay away from high-risk situations.

“It’s kind of a pendulum swing,” Nelson said. “If the last big offender came out of a treatment program, there’s a big hue and cry to do away with treatment. If he comes out of prison and re-offends, then they say, ‘of course he re-offended, he needs treatment.’ ”

At age 34, Donaldson has been in juvenile or adult detention for most of the past 20 years for attempted murder, robbery, sexual abuse of children and parole violations.

Donaldson’s sentence was a byproduct of the case of Theodore Frank, the convicted child molester who raped, tortured and murdered a 2 1/2-year-old Camarillo girl six weeks after his release from a state mental hospital.

The Legislature in 1982 abolished the state’s Mentally Disordered Sex Offender law that had sent Frank to a hospital instead of prison.

Now, sex convicts like Donaldson go through the determinate sentencing process. They serve a set time, can reduce it through good behavior and are paroled automatically.

Studies show that 51% of the sex offenders paroled in 1990 were returned to custody by 1992, according to the state Department of Corrections. More than half of them, 58%, came back for sex offenses.

Public policy continues to focus on tougher sentences. A new law taking effect in January will sentence three-time repeat offenders to 25 years to life and require potential parolees to be reviewed by the state Board of Prison Terms before release.

With the exception of two small experimental programs, there is no longer any comprehensive attempt to treat or alter the behaviors of California’s 8,277 imprisoned sex offenders or the 4,681 on parole, according to Department of Corrections officials.

“We need to do something with these people while they are in,” said Gary Lowe, who directs an experimental sex crimes treatment program for the Department of Corrections. “Incarceration keeps them off the street and keeps them from re-offending, which is a lot. But eventually, they have to come out.”

Lowe’s 4-year-old project monitors and treats risky sex-offender parolees, but hasn’t made it south to Los Angeles County, where there are 20,193 registered sex offenders.

So far, he said, about 15% to 17% of the estimated 300 parolees to pass through Lowe’s treatment have been taken back into custody, the vast majority of them for violating its strict parole rules. About 5% of the 300 were charged with sexual offenses, he said.

“We’ve got a lot of eyes on these guys,” Lowe said. “We find a guy with pornographic material, we get him off the street. If we find a rapist out after dark and he’s not supposed to be, we take him in.”

But the program works, in part, because parole officers are assigned a maximum of 35 parolees. The norm for Los Angeles County averages 80 to 100 per officer, according to DiMaggio.

In a little-known provision of the law that eliminated hospital terms for sex offenders, Atascadero has been charged with studying new treatments for sex offenders and tracking their repeat-offense rates.

Thus far, about 14% of prisoners released from Atascadero’s experimental program have committed sex crimes or other violent offenses, contrasted with 21% to 22% among those who did not participate, according to an Atascadero report.

The parolees studied would have been released automatically anyway and volunteered for treatment during their last 14 to 30 months of prison, said Nelson, who has run the program since it began in 1985.

Burned by the treatment path before, prosecutors remain pessimistic.

“There are plenty of experts who don’t believe it cures anything,” said Stephen Cooley, the head deputy district attorney for the San Fernando office.

“I compare it to liking ice cream,” said Lauren Weis, acting head deputy of the sexual crimes and child abuse division for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. “You don’t give up your taste for ice cream. You may change some of your behavior patterns, but the desire stays. . . . They do not change the basic desire underneath.”

Experts more often compare sexual predators to alcoholics--they are not cured, they are taught to gain control over their addiction.

The body of evidence available on repeat sex offenders is complex and sometimes contradictory. Sex predators frequently tell of scores of victims. And common theory holds that child molesters are more likely to repeat their offenses than the average convict. But statistics on repeat offenders often don’t bear it out.

“The scientific evidence is a little murky on it,” said the University of New Hampshire’s David Finkelhor, a sociology professor who studies child molestation. “Recidivism for child molesters in general is lower than for other violent crimes, but it appears as if the risk extends over a long period of time.”

At Atascadero, Nelson concedes that convicts paroled from his program may only now be entering their high-risk period. But he said that treatment effects tend to get stronger, not weaker, over time.

In the case of Donaldson, there is no evidence of any serious psychiatric care while he was incarcerated in the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo from 1982 to 1991, according to state parole and corrections officials.

The only counseling Donaldson appears to have received was about 56 hours of group therapy he attended in the 13 months that he obeyed his parole conditions, according to parole administrator DiMaggio. “It’s not really so much for a treatment value,” DiMaggio said of the sessions. “It’s more or less another way to keep an eye on them.”

When Donaldson left a downtown men’s shelter in March--one month after he was paroled--he failed, as required by law, to register with police at his new home, a violation of his parole. He has been wanted since then, but wasn’t the object of a concerted search until earlier this month when prosecutors issued a 19-count complaint charging him with the three Pacoima rapes.

Prosecutors say the evidence they have against Donaldson is firm. They will consider charging him under the new repeat-offender law that would make him eligible for a 25-years-to-life sentence, Cooley said.

But first, Cooley said, they must find him.

Suspect Accused in 6 Rapes

Robert Lee Donaldson has been accused of raping six children in the same Pacoima neighborhood, and attempting to assault a seventh.

The attacks came in two series, separated by 11 years, and centered around the intersection of Van Nuys Boulevard and Borden Avenue. There are two elementary schools and a middle school within a half-mile radius of that intersection.

According to court records, Donaldson, 34, was also accused of assaulting children at age 15 and 16.

Warrants charging Donaldson with the three most recent crimes, issued on Oct. 4, cite the following incidents:

* Aug. 30, 1993: An 11-year-old boy was kidnaped as he walked to the Hillery T. Broadous School and raped in a vacant apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard.

* Sept. 21, 1993: A 16-year-old Kennedy High School student en route to a bus stop was kidnaped and raped in the same location. She was also robbed of jewelry.

* Sept. 22, 1993: An 11-year-old girl, also a Broadous student, was kidnaped, raped and robbed at the same apartment.

Donaldson was also charged with four prior attacks, and in 1982, he pleaded guilty to robbing and sodomizing a 15-year-old in the same neighborhood.

These prior attacks included:

* Sept. 17, 1981: A 9-year-old boy was grabbed at a service station on Van Nuys Boulevard near Glenoaks Boulevard, and his attacker tried to sodomize him at knifepoint behind the station before being chased away by a security guard.

* Oct. 6, 1981: A 12-year-old Maclay Junior High School student was kidnaped near the school and driven to Hansen Dam Park, where he was sodomized at knifepoint.

* April 24, 1982: A 10-year-old boy was grabbed from in front of an apartment building in the 12600 block of Van Nuys Boulevard and dragged into nearby bushes, where he was sodomized at knifepoint.

* May 13, 1982: A 15-year-old boy was lured into a medical facility at Dronfield Avenue and Van Nuys Boulevard and sodomized at knifepoint in a bathroom. Donaldson pleaded guilty to this attack on Dec. 14, 1982, and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Donaldson’s juvenile record is closed, but when he was sentenced in 1982, prosecutors said it included child molestation and attempted murder.